


Long Before the Days of No Surrender

by Magnetism_bind



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt, Grabby hands in alleys, Heavy Angst, Idiots in Love, Jealousy, M/M, Mental Anguish, Period-Typical Homophobia, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-18
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-11-15 19:10:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11237379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magnetism_bind/pseuds/Magnetism_bind
Summary: Written for the tumblr prompt: This was never right.James ends their affair and leaves Thomas briefly adrift.





	Long Before the Days of No Surrender

There was a knock at the study door interrupting Thomas from his morning’s work.

“What is it?” He called out, a slight hint of irritation in his voice at having his focus disrupted. “I asked not to be disturbed.”

His butler stood in the doorway with an apologetic expression. “It’s Lieutenant McGraw, my lord. You asked to be informed immediately whenever he arrived.”

“Ah, yes, thank you, Harris. Please show him in.” Thomas sat back, wondering what it could be that brought James to him at a time they weren’t scheduled to meet.

James entered the study and waited for Harris to close the door behind him, before turning to face him.

The look on his face made Thomas rise to his feet. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, my lord.” James said. “I merely thought we needed to speak on a matter.”

“What matter?” Thomas asked instantly. From James’s grim expression he knew it was important.

“The matter of the nature of our relationship.” James paused and then kept speaking. “ I’ve come to believe the personal aspect of our relationship is unnecessary to continue our collaboration. From this point forward, we should continue to work on the venture simply as colleagues and not...”

Thomas barely heard any of what he said. “Unnecessary.” He repeated softly. “The personal aspect is unnecessary.”

“Yes.” James said. He sounded strained but resigned, like this was merely an unpleasant task he had to get through and then matters would be as they were before.

“Why?” Thomas asked. “Why?”

“Because I feel it’s unnecessary.” James repeated flatly. “The nature of...my affections have changed.”

Thomas’s throat had grown so tight he could barely speak. “I see.” He was numb; how could this be happening? “Well, it certainly sounds as though you had made up your mind.”

“There’s no reason to draw an affair out past its end.” James murmured.

 _An affair._  Thomas closed his eyes for a moment. Was that all it had been to James? A mere affair? He opened his eyes to see James watching him with careful eyes.

“Yes, of course.” Thomas swallowed again over the stone in his throat. “Regarding the restoration of Nassau…are you certain that you still want to assist with it?”

“It’s not a matter of wanting. I was assigned to it, but if you’d rather have someone else….”

Someone else in James’s place at his side. It would be agony, but the idea of working alongside James and not touching him, not looking up to see the wry amusement in James’s eyes whenever he said something optimistic would be agony too.

“I’ll consider it.” Thomas said, his voice slightly hoarse. “For the meantime let us continue.”

He regretted his choice of words as soon as he said them. There was a brief flare of pain in James’s eyes and then it was gone.

For a moment Thomas gazed at him, searching his face. There had to be something he could say, something James wasn’t telling him, but he sounded so certain, so final, and Thomas prided himself on never holding his lovers to any sort of constraint. He never wanted to keep a lover longer than they wanted him.

“Very well.” He cleared his throat. “I am very busy at the moment, Lieutenant, so if you would be so good as to show yourself out.”

James bowed his head slightly and left without more than a muttered, “Good day, my lord.”

*  *  *

Thomas wasn’t sure how he made it through the rest of the day, somehow apparently he did. He barely remembered a word of conversation, the details of the meetings he had had with people were vague and impossible to recall later when he thought about them. None of it registered. He just kept seeing James’s face as he said those words.

_My affections have changed._

Four simple words that destroyed Thomas, destroyed everything within him. He had fallen so completely in love that hearing them spoken so callously had shattered his heart. He’d thought James had too, but apparently he had been mistaken.

Miranda was away at the moment, visiting a cousin in the country, otherwise he wouldn’t have been so alone with his misery. He could have written to her; she would have traveled home immediately to be with him, but he wouldn’t burden her with this, no matter how anguished he was.

Somehow that day passed though he didn’t know how. Another day and then the next, and then another. Thomas walked through them like a ghost. He would do his duty and keep his word and do his best to rebuild Nassau, but James’s affections had changed and Thomas’s world was gray and lacking any semblance of meaning.

He had had relationships end before, naturally. That’s what happened. People married, or their desire faded or their feelings altered. It happened. But this had been different. His love for James was different. He had thought James was his new world.

                                                    *  *  *

It was nearly a week later that Thomas was on his way to speak with a captain of a ship currently in harbor regarding shipping business. It was the sort of errand he and James would have undertaken together while discussing the various aspects of their enterprise. He would have had the pleasure of James’s company, James walking at his side, their shoulders brushing into each other from time to time, that spark of joy sparking whenever they touched.

And now here he was just walking alone. It wasn’t the same. It would never be the same.

 _My affections have changed_. Thomas heard those four words again and again throughout the day.

He had his head down as he passed an alley, and he paused mid-stride. A young man, clearly a sailor from one of the ships in dock, stood just on the edge of the alley as he finished speaking to someone and then walked swiftly away. Thomas had paused because just the sight of the stature of the other man in the alley, his very pose in conversation, had caught his eye.

It was James. James meeting in an alley with a sailor, James standing too close with a sailor in an alley.

_James._

Thomas strode into the alley before he could even formulate a plan.

“Is this why you didn’t want to  _continue_?” He flung the word at James, who looked up, startled at the sight of him. “Why your affections  _changed?_ ”

“Thomas?”

“Is that why you broke it off? You had your taste of being in bed with a lord and when you'd had your amusement, when I expressed some true affection for you, you decided it was more than you cared for and you went back to what you really wanted."

James’s face tightened. "You think  _this_  is what I really wanted?"

"Someone who will suck your cock in an alley and expect nothing from you but a few pennies." Thomas sneered at him, and then helplessly, because he was helpless in the face of James, helpless not to confess the truth of his love. "You could have had both.”

James’s laugh was bitter to his ears. "Are you saying you'd have sucked my cock in this alley?"

Thomas reached for his breeches.

 _"Thomas."_  James grabbed at his wrist as Thomas kept speaking.

“You think so little of me that you just went out and found some bit of rough for your cock.”

He got his hand inside James’s breeches and James seized it by the wrist. “Thomas,  _stop_.”

“ _Thomas_ , still, not my lord?”

James’s eyes were pained and Thomas couldn’t bear it. He swallowed, looking down, between them where his hand was between their bodies.

“It’s not.” He could barely speak. He didn’t  _want_  to be jealous. “But I need to know why.”  _Why you stopped loving me?_

He couldn’t speak that part aloud. But James knew.

James’s grip tightened on his wrist, but Thomas’s hand still held his cock, held it so very lightly, as though it were a bird that would fly away if it had the chance.

“I didn’t.” James whispered “I couldn’t.”

Thomas stared at him in shock. “Then what the devil were you doing? Why did you say....”

 _My affections have changed_.

“Perhaps we could continue this conversation in a more private place?” James cast a meaningful look down at the hand Thomas still had inside his breeches.

Thomas hesitated. “Do you promise to tell me?”

“Are you really asking me that?”

Thomas pressed his thumb along his cock, stroking along the svelte underside, over the pulsing rigid heat of him, and James drew in a sharp breath.

“I give you my word, I will tell you the truth.”

Only then did Thomas remove his hand.

They stood there in awkward silence for a moment as James refastened his breeches.

Thomas hesitated. “I have an appointment with the captain of the Fair Nightingale.” He didn’t move.

“I’ll walk with you.” James said.

 *  *  * 

They walked side by side. Now Thomas’s mind was on ‘ _I didn’t, I couldn’t.’_ Would he never be rid of the sound of James’s voice repeating words in his mind?

Just the way James had spoken the words, a passionate murmur revealing the myriad of emotions that still remained within him had struck Thomas to his core.  Whatever had caused him to speak such words before, James loved him.

When they reached the rooms where the captain was staying, James waited below in the lane while Thomas made his inquires as quickly as possible. The captain of the Fair Nightingale was a jovial man and intended to prolong a conversation with anecdotes and snippets of seafaring lore. Any other time Thomas would have indulged him because he was truly interested in the man’s tales, but today he couldn’t bear to stay another second.

“I’m sorry, I have another appointment of the utmost urgency,” he interrupted finally when the captain suggested a glass of sherry. “Another time, perhaps.”

His hurried departure left the captain scratching his brow and wondering what had gotten into the young lord. Usually Lord Hamilton was civil and conversational. Ah, well, it was spring. He put it down to the usual vagaries of the upper-class and went about his business. 

 *  *  *

“Where’s your carriage?” James asked after they had walked a few tormented steps.

“At the end of the lane.” Thomas answered, quickening his pace.

They finally reached it and they were safely inside and headed back towards the house, Thomas rapping out the order to his driver.

At last they were alone. 

Thomas turned to James. “Now, would you please?”

He barely got those four words out before James had tossed his hat aside and kissed him, pressing him back against the carriage wall.

“I’m sorry, I never wanted to... Christ, Thomas.” The words were punctuated by feverish kisses over Thomas’s mouth that left Thomas breathless, but bewildered.

“What on earth caused you to say those foolish things…” He said as soon as he had the chance. “Why, James?” It was a different why now, but important nonetheless.

James sighed and leaned back in his seat. “It wasn’t foolish.” He said. “I had a reason. The foolishness lay in thinking it would be worth giving you up.”

“James, whatever you’re saying, please explain. Did someone say something?”

“Not about us.” James said. A few locks of his hair had escaped his tie, falling over his brow. He pushed them back impatiently. “I was there when a fellow captain caught his cabin boy kissing another boy in the stables. The boy was whipped and dismissed from his crew.” He stared down at his clasped hands. “And it just reminded me of all the dangers if we were caught. What it would mean for you. I didn’t want to be the cause of that for you, but I knew you wouldn’t accept it if I told my concerns so I just thought I’d…”

He bit his lip. “But I couldn’t bear it.” He leaned forward to kiss Thomas again, “I love you too much.”

Thomas groaned into his mouth at the intensity in his voice, the fervor of his lips. “Would you have said anything if I hadn’t accosted you in the alley?”

“I intended to come to you tonight.” James confessed.

“What were you doing in the alley anyway?” Thomas hated himself for asking, but he did anyway.

“That bit of rough as you called him, was a crew member of the Bonny Lass. I've had my suspicions about her captain for a while now and wanted to know if he's been making any bargains with the pirates."

Thomas blushed. “I’m sorry. I was merely…jealous.”

James cupped his face in his hands and kissed him again. “I know.”

 *  *  *

Later in bed James sighed and turned over restlessly, muttering something quietly into his pillow.

“What?”

James turned his face to gaze at him. “This was never right.”

“What?” Thomas asked again, this a time a little worriedly.  

“Pretending I didn’t love you.” James whispered. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’d thought it was the right thing to do, but I was mistaken. Can you ever forgive me?”

“My affections have changed…” Thomas said quietly. “Those words nearly destroyed me.”

In a heartbeat James rolled over atop him. He gazed down at Thomas with love, love there for the whole world to see.

“Those words were true, but not how I said them.” He pressed a kiss to Thomas’s collarbone and then lower, confessing his love in between heated kisses down Thomas’s bare chest. “My affections have indeed changed, in that I love you too much. They are too passionate, they contain too much for any mere affections. You are my heart.”

He looked up at Thomas, his eyes pleading for Thomas to understand, to forgive him. “Thomas, I love you more than life itself.”

Thomas clasped his face and kissed him. Those affections he would accept.


End file.
